Introducing Linkbot

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Welcome to Linkbot, the award-winning site management tool from Tetranet Software that will help you organize, manage and maintain your Web site. Linkbot can help you improve the quality of your Web site by tracking down bugs and by helping you repair them. Linkbot will also save you hours of time by automating on-going testing and maintenance. Its never been easier to maintain an error free site!

How does it work?

You start Linkbot just like you would a Web browser - just type in the starting URL for your site. Linkbot will then scan through your site at incredible speeds, automatically test each URL on your Web site and map out the site's structure for you.

Background on Site Management

Experienced Webmasters and authors know that site maintenance is an essential part of the Web development process. Pages quickly become stale and links become severed. As Web sites grow in size, maintenance problems will increase exponentially. It is practically impossible to maintain a quality site without the aid of site management tools.

Checking a site for errors is not a one-time event. Internal links must be scanned every time the site is modified. External links should be checked every day because the Webmaster never knows when a target site may change and break the link. Other maintenance activities, such as scanning the site for stale content and bloated files, should be done on a weekly or monthly basis, depending on the size of the site.

Linkbot contains all the tools Webmasters need to maintain an error-free site:

Locate broken links, missing images and stale content
The quality of a website is a direct reflection of the company that produced it. Web site bugs like broken links and stale content project a negative impression about a company's products and services. Linkbot helps keep a site error-free by quickly locating problem areas and helping you to correct them.
Identify unused (orphaned) files
Is it safe to delete that old file from the Web server? Linkbot can answer this question for you by scanning your Web server for files that are no longer being used.
Find large pages with slow download times.
About 70% of Internet users connect at speeds of 28.8 Kbs or less. Are you losing visitors because of slow download times?
Visualize the structure and organization of the site.
Map the structure of your site in Linkbot's intuitive "Explorer style" interface.
Organize maintenance for your work groups.
If you have more than one author developing content on your site, Linkbot's workgroup report will help separate problems by the author of the page.
Schedule website analyses to automate routine maintenance.
Automate maintenance by scheduling regular analyses of your site.
Save time and improve the quality of your site.
Linkbot's multitasking spidering engine can identify the key problem areas on your site in record time.

How to use this tutorial

This tutorial contains 13 exercises that will give you hands on experience working with Linkbot on the management of a typical Web site. The exercises in this tutorial will show you how easy it is to maintain a bug-free site using Linkbot.

It's not necessary to work through all 13 exercises in the tutorial. As long as you've loaded the example file or scanned your site (as described in Exercise 1), you can do the exercises in any order. There are two ways to follow along with the tutorial:

Start Linkbot and load the "tutorial.bot" file included with your Linkbot installation.
Choose Open from the file menu and select the tutorial.bot found in the "/tutorial" directory where you installed the software.
Start Linkbot and scan your own site.
Use the tutorial example to perform the same functions on your own Web site.

You may also wish to print out the tutorial pages and follow along from your print out.

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